HOW SDPD CAUGHT MOVIE THEATER GUNMAN

Details emerge on how police sealed off shopping center, located armed suspect and wounded him

San Diego 
When San Diego police got the call Saturday afternoon of a man holding his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint at a busy Carmel Mountain shopping center, officers swarmed the area.

That the incident ended inside a movie theater with the gunman wounded and no one else hurt is a credit to the officers being “on top of their game,” police Capt. Dan Christman, the Northeastern Division’s commanding officer, said Monday.

At least 18 officers from two different divisions were dispatched to the area on Carmel Mountain Road and Rancho Carmel Drive within five minutes of the first call at 2:22 p.m. When the incident ended about 90 minutes later, more than 50 officers had responded, including SWAT and K-9 teams.

“They were ready for the challenge and it showed,” Christman said.

The gunman, identified as Tom Billodeaux, 22, of Escondido, had accosted his ex-girlfriend outside a Chipotle restaurant where she worked and had pointed a handgun at onlookers before running across the street, police said. He disappeared into a large commercial area that includes the Reading Cinemas Carmel Mountain 12, the U.S. Post Office Processing and Distribution Center, and Costco.

He told the ex-girlfriend he wanted to die and planned on committing “suicide by cop,” Christman said.

“That does not mean that they are going to stand there and be killed,” he said. “Usually that means there’s going to be a shootout of some kind — that they are going to go down in a blaze of glory.”

Officers immediately set up a perimeter around the shopping center and extended it some six blocks up Rancho Carmel Drive past the post office and Costco and back down the other side of Carmel Mountain Road.

“No one in, and no one out,” Christman said.

They then began a systematic and coordinated manhunt as a police helicopter assisted from overhead. Officers stopped cars, looked in back seats and trunks, and checked each business for the gunman.

At the same time, officers spoke to several witnesses about Billodeaux and got his picture, which they shared with one another on their cellphones, Christman said.

When two women leaving the movie theater asked officers what all of the activity was about, they learned that a gunman might be in the cinemas, police Capt. Terry McManus said Monday.

They told the officers that about an hour into “Lincoln” — the movie they were seeing — a man came into the theater. When the film ended, he was “hanging out and acting suspicious,” McManus said.

Officers determined the man the witnesses were describing was likely Billodeaux, and they worked with the staff at Reading Cinemas to lock down the business, McManus said, so a methodical theater-by-theater search could be done.

All of the films were stopped and the lights went on, which led some patrons to leave their seats to find out what was happening.

Two officers went into a theater where “Les Misérables” was showing and spotted Billodeaux, McManus said. He wasn’t sitting near the 15 or so other moviegoers.